Gujarat riots 2002: The day the mob came

State police stand guard as shops burn in Ahmedabad during the Gujarat riots in 2002. Pics/Getty Images

That first night of March, the moon doesn't come out.

Somewhere across the river, an armed mob starts to make its way.

We are on their list. But they know of the slums underneath. And that the darkness can work in their favour to catch us in our sleep. We don't know any of this as we sleep in our beds, eight storeys above the slums.

Suddenly my eyes crack open, disturbed dreams coursing through my vision as I start to adjust to the bedroom's black air.

‘Naara-e-takbeer . . .' Someone is screaming a rallying cry far away.

‘Allah hu-akbar!' a crowd is roaring back. The crowd is below our building.

We jump out of our beds, feeling in our bones the rumbling mass of bodies below. The mob on the riverbed yells more belligerently, ‘Maaro, kaato!' Kill them, chop them!

An Ahmedabad resident watches as a market is set ablaze by rioters in February 2002

The voices of ‘our people' lift in reply, ‘Allah hu-akbar!'

The Hindu mob's stealth has been of no use. Molotov cocktails rise out of the Muslim slums, their soft cotton rags dipped in petrol, ripping, flaming, streaking across the dark riverbed, telling the bloodthirsty mob: ‘We are ready. God is great.'

The next morning, I will hear from [building liftman] Hussain bhai and [domestic worker] Gulshan and whispers in the hallways how the slums started to prepare the minute the news of the train burning broke. Shift after shift of hotblooded, underfed, impoverished Muslim bodies preparing crude ammunition, digging a moat in the riverbed, men, women, the sick, the elderly and underfed children, they had chosen to go down fighting.

Then I will understand the circles under Gulshan's eyes. These people whom I am staring down at, who have fought poverty and persecution elsewhere, travelled miles to come to this river and make it their home, who sweep our floors and wash our clothes and plait our hair and kill our lice; they know they will be killed first by this raging, mutilating machine that is sweeping through our streets. Their bodies are fighting for their own survival, and for their children's, and in the bargain saving us too. They have lived cheek by jowl with this hate for years before it has risen now to hit all of us. They've been denied home, land, a classroom, water, dignity. They're fighting like they have nothing to lose anymore.

My whole family stands like deer on the balcony, watching the conflagration, whimpering prayers in the dark. We have so many prayers for everything: birth, death, cleansing ourselves, travel, cooking, entering or leaving a home. But in this moment my brain can't process any of the hundreds of incantations I've spent a childhood memorising.

We're told that on the Day of Judgement the chant ‘La-ilahaillilah Muhammad-ur-rasool-illah' will be our pass to eternal Heaven. We must let the records show that when we died, we believed in Allah and his Messenger.

But right here, when it feels like our Night of Judgement has arrived, I can't remember what my dying words as a good Muslim should be. I'm convinced there is no heaven. I am frozen, watching figures rushing across the shadow-ripped riverbed, and all I can mouth is a strange combination of ‘Amma . . . Allah . . . Amma . . . Allah.' My mother, my god, my mother, my god.

Thirteen months before this day, another kind of hell had struck these very streets. An earthquake 7.9 on the Richter scale had brought Ahmedabad and Gujarat to their knees, killing more than fifty thousand Gujaratis of all castes, colours and faiths. Our Hindu friends across the river had taken us into their bungalow, where we lived for a whole month as structural engineers poked and prodded Jasmine's foundations to make sure it was safe for residents to return. We had fled with the clothes on our backs on a night just like this. A week after we started sheltering with them, an aftershock had struck, sending us all scampering outside in the cold spring night in only our pajamas and kurtas and braless nighties. Facing imminent death then as we are now, Amma had started to chant. ‘La-illaha-illilah Muhammad-ur-rasool-illah.' The Hindu lady whose house we were living in, spooked and trembling, grabbed me tight and started saying the chant too. When the earth finally stilled, we slunk back to the house and stayed up the rest of the night in their living room playing charades. At one point, Amma suddenly looked at this auntie and snidely asked: ‘Bina ben, did you start saying the Shahadah with me earlier? I guess now you are a Muslim!'

Embarrassed, this auntie turned into a human tomato and laughed it off.

‘Haan, haan, sab mantra ek hi toh hain. Sab Bhagwan ek hain.' All our chants are for the same god.

These friends sleep soundly in their beds tonight. They will not find out till the morning if we die tonight. I don't know how to call anyone who lives across this strip of land from me a friend anymore.

As I watch the shadows fight, two voices are wrestling in my head: one wants ‘our people', the slum-dwelling, Molotov cocktail-building saviours to destroy these dark, invisible others, this mob who so refuses to see our humanity that it has come sneaking and slithering in the dark to laugh at the terror in our eyes.

This mob sees us only as pests, to be stamped out, chopped up, raped, set fire to, annihilated.

I can feel Amma grabbing the soft patchwork blanket I sleep with, to cover my body. I didn't realise I was shivering.

I want this mob to die the death it seeks to give me.

Excerpted with permission from The Lucky Ones by Zara Chowdhary, published by Context, Westland Books